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The Society of Professional Journalists faces a “dire situation”
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July 28, 2015, 2:39 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: ig.ft.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Justin Ellis   |   July 28, 2015

Should you find yourself wondering the status of industrial production in the U.K., or the status of the housing market, or, for that matter, unemployment rate, the Financial Times has just the tool for you.

This morning, the FT launched The U.K. economy at a glance, a bookmark-friendly dashboard that tells the story of the economy through charts and data. If you’re looking for indicators on GDP growth or currency markets, even construction output, the FT collects it all in one place. Interestingly, the economic dashboard is available to readers outside the FT’s paywall, at least for the time being. The release of the economic dashboard comes a week after Pearson agreed to sell the FT to Japanese publisher Nikkei.

The collection of charts has a similar feel to the old stock tables newspapers used to run in the business section. Even better, the assemblage of data here gets updated automatically, along with links to the sources of data and corresponding FT stories to financial topics.

The app is a good example of ways media companies can build new products around their existing content. It’s likely all the data on the dashboard also has uses in FT stories, like a report from today about the acceleration of GDP growth in the U.K.

The dashboard was created by economics reporter Emily Cadman, with interactive design editor Steven Bernard and developer Tom Pearson.

The dashboard is the latest in a string of tools released by the FT to increase reader engagement and reach out to new — and maybe more importantly, nonsubscribing — audiences. Products like FastFT and FT Antenna, which was launched last year, are focused on aggregating top stories of interest to FT readers. The company also launched FirstFT a morning email briefing on stories from the FT and others around the web.

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